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The 'Million-Dollar' Secret
To Inventing Plots for Novels

By

Harry Stephen Keeler

Updated July 30, 2001 12:01 a.m. ET

(Originally appeared in Writer's Digest, 1947)

My good friend Aron Mathieu, who has watched my published novels, over the last 17 years, grow from 1 to 60 in number, asked me if it is not time to reveal that "million-dollar" plot-inventing secret in some ten or twelve thousand words.